Lectures on Imagination
Description :
Ricoeurs theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeurs most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination moving from
Aristotle Pascal Spinoza Hume and Kant to Ryle Price Wittgenstein Husserl and Sartre These thinkers he contends underestimate humanitys creative capacity While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the image Ricoeur develops a theory about the minds power to produce new realities Modeled most clearly in fiction this productive imagination Ricoeur argues is available across conceptual domains His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political social and scientific structures Rather our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world